As you all probably know, adding a search word like “free” to a Google search can increase your crappy results exponentially. This sucks when all you want to find is a free little graphic for a power point or word document. It really shouldn’t be this hard to find something so simple. This is where we take advantage of both Google, and the social media sites in order to get instant highly relevant results, and quick access to freebies. It’s like using every social bookmarking site at once.

Thanks to site’s like Digg, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. which rely on users submitting the best content from around the web, there exists an easy way to find the best of the best using a quick Google search trick. Most of the urls submitted to these popular social bookmarking sites are better than average.

It differs from site to site depending on robot behavior, but Google indexes these pages on the social media sites. Why does this matter? Because we can use Google to search ONLY the sites we choose for links containing certain keywords, or “search terms,” just like a normal Google query, giving us keyword results for whatever from the best submitted urls on the most popular sites on the web.

Google provides us with a list of “operators” that can restrict your search results by a given criteria. You can type these operators before any search from any google search bar, even your browser. The one we well be using is “site:” Find a complete list of Google search operators here.

To things fast, all you have to do is restrict your Google search to the best sites that are known for housing links to good stuff. This way we can use Google to retrieve a list, instead of having to browse those sites ourselves. For example, go to a Google page or search bar somewhere and type:

Site:digg.com Web Icons

Now hit enter to get your results. Google only gives you results from that site, in this case, Digg. This technique probably works the best with Digg because Digg allows each of its story pages to be indexed by Google. On other sites, Google might give you a page that has all post with a “tag” that matches your search terms. Either way, you are getting to some pretty good links, really fast.

Another reason this works is the fact that even if you don’t get directly to the source from the Google results, chances are you will stumble upon a blog entry with a collection of links to more specific content. Sites like these are getting famous for collecting links to good stuff, and usually get submitted to sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Slashdot, etc. on a regular basis.

Chances are the social media sites may be a bit new to you so here is a list of a few sites to get you started:

Social bookmarking/media sites

• site:digg.com
• site:del.icio.us
• site:slashdot.com
• site:reddit.com
• site:stumbleupon.com
• site:netscape.com
• site:clipmarks.com

Big blogging networks

• site:blogmarks.com
• site:technorati.com
• site:bloglines.com
• site:mybloglog.com

You might even think about trying to search some of the biggest/best/your favorite blogs themselves to narrow the search return even more.

This little tip on searching Google should help you speed up your time searching as well as return much more qualified returns with a lot less effort.